As the in-home fitness market continues to grow and people are starting to realize that VR can be used as a fitness tool, games like Beat Saber, BOXVR, Creed and many more are pushing players and increasing their physical activity.
This new popularity in the VR fitness space gave rise to a new startup called YUR (“why you are”), a company founded by Cix Liv (co-founder of LIV) and Dilan Shah (founder of Projectfutur.es), that combines fitness and gaming using immersive technology. Its debut product is a fitness-tracking tool that already has over 100k downloads. The product uses tracking data to watch calorie burn while playing VR games, and it doesn’t need any extra hardware to make it happen.
If you are interested, join their Discord at yur.chat
With YUR, fitness is more engaging –– making workouts more enjoyable and less taxing to the body by immersing the mind. YUR plans to use VR to combine entertainment with fitness through content accessible to home users, and potentially location-based virtual reality.
YUR was started because the co-founders recognized a pattern: that many of the top games were active on their own. This meant that people were essentially becoming fit in a passive way, while so entertained they were not even aware. If gamers played active games as much as they do Fortnite, Cix and Dilan realized this could be paradigm shifting for fitness.
The first unofficially supported VR game is Beat Saber, the world’s most popular and played VR game. YUR is available for immediate use through its game mod. Simply install the Mod Saber tool into the game directory with your Beat Saber application. Once the download is completed, check the “YURfit Calorie Tracker” box and click Install/Update, then launch Beat Saber.
We talked to Cix about what YUR means for VR users, and what they can hope to get out of the experience. “Gaming and fitness have always been my biggest passions,” he told us. “This product allows our users to combine these two passions.”
Dilan and Cix are joined by Beat Saber mod contributor Ethan McCosby who has been hired by YUR. Together they are working on an SDK to let game developers integrate fitness-tracking tools into their own products as well as a mobile app. The mobile app will sync training data to Apple Health via Workouts and aims to further build a community around VR training experiences.
It’s important to note YUR will be more than a Beat Saber mod and will be integrated into more VR games as time goes on.
The future of YUR certainly looks bright, and the team has big plans for the company and the product.
“YUR wants to become the network for people that want to engage in this new form of immersive technology,” Cix added. “It will take a village, and many of those people haven’t even seen AR or VR yet.”
YUR is intended to be a community-led service, and if you’re interested in trying it out, you can join the company’s Discord channel. From there, you can request a beta sign up for the app and start tracking your fitness progress in Beat Saber.